Louis S. Warren (93 page)

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Authors: Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody,the Wild West Show

Tags: #State & Local, #Buffalo Bill, #Entertainers, #West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), #Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), #Biography, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Fiction, #United States, #General, #Pioneers - West (U.S.), #Historical, #Frontier and Pioneer Life, #Biography & Autobiography, #Pioneers, #West (U.S.), #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, #Entertainers - United States, #History

24. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 4–5. For Indians in the Civil War, Jay Monaghan,
Civil War
on the Western Border,
1854–1865
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1955), 209–27; also Ari Kelman, “Deadly Currents: John Ross's Decision of 1861 Sheds Light on Race and Sovereignty in the Cherokee Nation,”
Chronicles of Oklahoma
62 (Spring 1995): 80–103.

25. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 5; JCGM, 459; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
42.

26.
The Democratic Platform
[Liberty, Missouri], Sept. 28, 1854, quoted in Russell,
Lives and
Legends,
14.

27. JCGM, 459–60; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
41–42.

28. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
43.

29. JCGM, 460; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
42.

30. Nicole Etcheson,
Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Thomas Goodrich,
War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas,
1854–1861
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998).

31. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
43.

32. JCGM, 460.

33. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
48.

34. JCGM, 471.

35. Thomas Goodrich,
Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border,
1861–65
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–5; Etcheson,
Bleeding Kansas,
109–112.

36. JCGM, 443; for Topeka legislature, and Grasshopper Falls, see Etcheson,
Bleeding Kansas,
50–88, 150.

37. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
47.

38. JCGM, 465–66.

39. JCGM, 465.

40. JCGM, 471.

41. JCGM, 471.

42. JCGM, 475.

43. JCGM, 475.

44. The estimate is from Home E. Socolofsky, “Kansas,” in
The New Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest,
ed. Howard R. Lamar (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 585. Charles Dunn led an attack on free state voters at Leavenworth in 1855. The Kickapoo Rangers attacked Grasshopper Falls in 1856. Etcheson,
Bleeding Kansas,
75, 134.

45. JCGM, 475.

46. Daniel C. Fitzgerald, Faded Dreams: More Ghost Towns of Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), xi.

47. Maria E. Montoya, “Santa Fe and Chihuahua Trail,” in Lamar,
Encyclopedia of the AmericanWest,
1021–22; Elliott West,
The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to
Colorado
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 8.

48. Merrill J. Mattes,
The Great Platte River Road
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 23.

49. Mattes,
Great Platte River Road,
23.

50. JCGM, 455.

51. West,
Contested Plains,
145.

52. West,
Contested Plains,
216.

53. West,
Contested Plains,
211–12.

54. West,
Contested Plains,
211–12. The use of this new route did not last long, as the partners acquired a mail contract which required them to deliver along the older government route to the north, along the Platte River, connecting to Denver with a cutoff along the South Platte River.

55. Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of
1859,
quoted in Corbett,
Orphans Preferred,
16–17.

56. Mary Cody sued William Russell and several associates in 1860, claiming that after Isaac died they had taken property which belonged to him. See Rosa and May,
Bu falo Bill and
His Wild West,
10.

57. West,
Contested Plains,
215–25.

58. JCGM, 476.

59. John Willis to WFC, Oct. 4, 1897, in Stella Foote,
Letters from “Bu falo Bill,”
(Billings, MT: Foote Publishing Co., 1954), 46; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 12.

60. Elliott West,
Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 87–91.

61. Norman F. Furniss,
The Mormon Conflict,
1850–1859
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 109–10.

62. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 13; Otis G. Hammond, ed.,
The Utah Expedition,
1857–58:
Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf., U.S.A., of Concord, N.H., to Mrs Gove, and Special
Correspondence of the New York Herald
(Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 12:28, 70. Leroy and Ann Hafen, eds., “Diary of Captain John W. Phelps,” in The
Utah Expedition: A Documentary Account
(Arthur H. Clark, 1958), 8:90–102, 149, esp. 102; “Morehead's Narrative” (with details about the Indian raid) is in William Elsey Connelley,
War with Mexico: Doniphan's Expedition and the Conquest of New Mexico and California
(Topeka, KS: By the author, 1907), 604–5.

63. WFC to Julia Cody Goodman, June 9, 1911, in Stella A. Foote,
Letters from Bu falo
Bill,
72.

64. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 15–17. Crossing the South Platte in Aug. 1857, Captain Jesse Gove remarked, “The water was not over three feet deep in the current.” Hammond,
Utah Expedition,
42.

65. Cody recalls being hired by George Chrisman, who was merely a station tender and had no authority to hire anybody. He later says he rode on “Bill Trotter's division” of the line. But Trotter became division agent for the firm later on. In 1859, he was actually bound for Denver as a teamster. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
104; Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17; “William Trotter,” Progressive Men of Montana (Chicago: A. W. Bowen and Co., 1901), 933.

66. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19; Joseph G. Rosa,
They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and
Adventures of James Butler Hickok,
2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 43.

67. JCGM, 488.

68. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 19.

69. Mark Pinney, “Charles Becker: Pony Express Rider and Oregon Pioneer,”
Oregon HistoricalQuarterly
67, no. 3 (Sept. 1966): 213–56, esp. 228.

70. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 17–19; Alexander Majors,
Seventy Years on the Frontier
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1893), 243, also 182–93; Russell,
Lives and Legends of Bu falo
Bill,
47–48; Corbett,
Orphans Preferred,
154–55.

71. Gray, “Fact Versus Fiction,” 16; Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
89; Valentine Devinny,
The
Story of a Pioneer
(Denver: Reed Publishing Co., 1904), 11–12, 44–46. For a description of Pony Express riding, see Corbett,
Orphans Preferred,
82.

72. Sarah Barringer Gordon,
The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in
Nineteenth-Century America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 55–83; Will Bagley,
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain
Meadows
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 307–22; see also Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); and Juanita Brooks,
The Mountain Meadows Massacre,
3rd ed. (1950; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970).

73. Russell,
Lives and Legends,
35–36.

74. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 224; Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in
The Rustle of Language
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–48.

75. “Camp Sketches—No. IX—John Nelson,”
The Topical Times,
Aug. 27, 1887, in Julia Cody Goodman Scrapbook, MS 58, NSHS; Dan L. Thrapp, Encyclopedia of Frontier Biog
raphy,
3 vols. (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1988), 2:1048–49.

76. John Kasson,
Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America,
1776–
1900
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 53–136.

77. Quoted in Corbett,
Orphans Preferred,
121.

78. Malcolm J. Rohrbough,
Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 32.

79. W. Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construc
tionin the Trans-Mississippi West,
1846–1869
(1952; rprt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 161–62, 164.

80. Donald C. Biggs, The Pony Express: Creation of the Legend (San Francisco: privately printed, 1956), 16–17, quote from 17.

81. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
30.

82. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
30.

83. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
30–37.

84. For the circus in California and the Pacific, see John Culhane,
The American Circus: An
Illustrated History
(New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 80–81. For horses: Hubert Howe Bancroft,
California Pastoral
(San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 336; Dan Flores,
Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 81–124.

85. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
33.

86. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
37.

87. William Webb,
Bu falo Land
(Cincinnati and Chicago: E. Hannaford and Co., 1873), 149.

88. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
135.

89. Ned Buntline [E. Z. C. Judson], Bu falo Bill: The King of Border Men (1869; rprt. William Roba, Davenport, IA: Service Press, 1987).

90. Sagala,
Bu falo Bill, Actor,
110.

91. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
46.

CHAPTER TWO : THE ATTACK ON THE SETTLER'S CABIN

1. See chapter 9.

2. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
139.

3. Thomas Goodrich,
Black Flag: Guerrilla Warfare on the Western Border,
1861–65
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 6–7.

4. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
16, 24.

5. John Mack Faragher,
Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 86; David P. Handlin, The American Home: Architecture and Society,
1815–1915
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1979), 4; David B. Danbom,
The Resisted
Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture,
1900–1930
(Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979), 9: “Economic exigencies and the American practice of individual land settlement conspired to make the family the preeminent social, economic, and educational institution of rural society.”

6. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
frontispiece.

7. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
126, 135.

8. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
135.

9. JCGM, 488–89.

10. Quoted in Thomas Goodrich,
Black Flag,
67–70. Mendenhall was recording events from May 1861. In his autobiography, Cody claimed to have joined them in the winter of 1862, but since most of the Red Leg forays occurred in the summer of 1862, he likely has confused dates and seasons, as he frequently did in his autobiography. Julia Cody recalls that her brother “stayed out all summer” with the Red Legs. JCGM, 488–89.

11. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
69.

12. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
69.

13. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
144–45.

14. Thomas Ewing, commander of the Eleventh Kansas Volunteers, singled out the Red Legs as especially virulent examples of certain Kansans who were “stealing themselves rich in the name of liberty,” and “giving respectability to robbery when committed on any whom they declare disloyal.” Ewing threatened to meet them “with a rough hand.” General James Blunt, the Union officer in charge of Kansas in 1863, ordered the Ninth Kansas Volunteers into western Missouri, with the stated purpose of fighting the Red Legs as well as the bushwhackers. (Captain Tough, whom Cody claimed as his commander, had close ties to Blunt.) Albert Castel,
A Frontier State at War: Kansas,
1861–1865
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), 111–13, 137, 214–15.

15. Charles Sellers,
The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America,
1815–1846
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 19–21; Faragher,
Sugar Creek,
96–99, 199–204, argues that the market penetration of western farming prior to 1850 was slow and uneven.

16. JCGM, 479.

17. JCGM, 490.

18. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
125–27.

19. The affidavits are in Box 1, Folder 18, William F. Cody Collection, MS 6 Series I:A., BBHC.

20. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
127.

21. Goodrich,
Black Flag
and
War to the Knife: Bleeding Kansas,
1854–1861
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998); Stephen Z. Starr, Jennison's Jayhawkers: A Civil War Cavalry
Regiment and Its Commander
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 96–118; T. J. Stiles,
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

22. JCGM, 489.

23. Goodrich,
Black Flag,
114.

24. Quoted in Joseph G. Rosa,
They Called Him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James
Butler Hickok,
2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 26.

25. Cody,
Life of Bu falo Bill,
135.

26. Ibid.

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